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There's always Fireborn for that, but it's... not great? 'Salright.
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Jan 26, 2017 19:57
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Alien Rope Burn posted:There's always Fireborn for that, but it's... not great? 'Salright. The draconic one is Fairest, not Elemental.
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Jan 26, 2017 20:01
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The worrying thing about Beast is not that it's just a bad OPP product. The worrying thing is the culture at OPP that made them stand behind Beast so aggressively. In many ways these writers really, genuinely, think the toxic dynamic between Beasts and Heroes is identical to what occurs in the real world. Beasts aren't considered privileged by society, while Heroes are, therefore the correct and moral thing is to unconditionally support Beasts and condemn Heroes regardless of context or individual actors. They believe that this is how things work IRL, and by and large live it in their interactions with others. I mean, I've seen people like Hill or McFarland indulge in this mindset all the time. They were genuinely befuddled when there was a negative reaction to Beast because as far as they understand this is how privilege really does work. So what if a Beast makes a person's life a little worse? They decided to say something problematic on Facebook or voted for Trump, that totally justifies violence or intrusion into another person's life. There were a dozen writers contributing to this thing, and a culture that decided this was not only fit to publish but a totally awesome and a progressive thing. It represents how they genuinely look at the world, and I'm a little surprised that Beast doesn't just turn people off the entirety of these writers' output, not just Beast.
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Jan 26, 2017 20:04
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:The draconic one is Fairest, not Elemental. I was referring to the Fantasy Flight Games RPG, unless you're just making a funny.
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Jan 26, 2017 20:06
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:The draconic one is Fairest, not Elemental. The Fireborn that ARB refers to is: https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/fireborn/products/fireborn-players-handbook-download/ A game about playing a Dragon in human form in Modern day London, except sometimes during fights you flashback to the old days where you were an actual dragon and poo poo. e;fb.
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Jan 26, 2017 20:07
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I was referring to the Fantasy Flight Games RPG, unless you're just making a funny. Oh, no, I thought you were talking about a WoD game mechanic, not a different game. That sounds like an interesting recommendation, though, so thanks for clarifying.
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Jan 26, 2017 20:08
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Bedlamdan posted:The worrying thing about Beast is not that it's just a bad OPP product. The worrying thing is the culture at OPP that made them stand behind Beast so aggressively. In many ways these writers really, genuinely, think the toxic dynamic between Beasts and Heroes is identical to what occurs in the real world. Beasts aren't considered privileged by society, while Heroes are, therefore the correct and moral thing is to unconditionally support Beasts and condemn Heroes regardless of context or individual actors. Honestly, I suspect they just think that Beasts are mostly like the vaguely-innocent kid in the chapter fiction, and that serial killer beasts are the outlier, and are willfully ignoring the fact that the book gives most of the people reading it the opposite impression (and thus, not doing anything to fix that impression in newer material).
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Jan 26, 2017 20:09
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Bedlamdan posted:The worrying thing is the culture at OPP that made them stand behind Beast so aggressively. 
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Jan 26, 2017 20:09
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Rand Brittain posted:Honestly, I suspect they just think that Beasts are mostly like the vaguely-innocent kid in the chapter fiction, and that serial killer beasts are the outlier, and are willfully ignoring the fact that the book gives most of the people reading it the opposite impression (and thus, not doing anything to fix that impression in newer material). How does a child Beast even work? Ignoring whether it's even possible for Beast's metaphysics, how the hell does the kid feed?
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Jan 26, 2017 20:20
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You have to admit it's not a good look. I like OPP and a lot of their work, I think they have a lot of talent and genuinely want to write good, non-creepy books! Beast is just...an ugly splotch on an otherwise good record.
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Jan 26, 2017 20:20
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Mors Rattus posted:How does a child Beast even work? Ignoring whether it's even possible for Beast's metaphysics, how the hell does the kid feed? Reckless scattering of Lego, juice box theft, calling a kid named Sheldon Smelly Shelly. Real sinister poo poo, imo.
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Jan 26, 2017 20:22
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Out of curiosity, has anyone else here actually played Beast? I had a group that playtested it. We were all excited to get in on the ground floor of the newest WoD game, and at first I was pretty stoked reading the rules and making a character, as I hadn't really read enough to soak in the context (notably, I hadn't read any of the stuff about Heroes). I made a kind of gollum-like prosecutor who fed on defeating violent criminals in courtroom, or sometimes going after bad people the system let go. The first inkling that something was wrong was when all the other players showed up with characters centered around working in a strip club and feeding on the patrons (a stripper, a bouncer, and...I think a dirty cop? They all made characters together and I made mine separately.) I immediately knew I was not on the same page as everyone else. Also, while my hunger was punishment, theirs were all power. The game consisted almost entirely of invading a vampire's mansion to get him to leave one of his ghouls, a stripper, alone. This was done by brutally torturing and murdering all of his (human) security staff and domestic servants in gruesome, gratuitous ways. I suggested that I wasn't really expecting to play straight up psychopaths reveling in gore and slaughter. They said, "That's what we like so much about Beast!" So, there's your Beast fans, I guess. I don't really talk to those guys anymore.
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Jan 26, 2017 20:39
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Rand Brittain posted:Honestly, I suspect they just think that Beasts are mostly like the vaguely-innocent kid in the chapter fiction, and that serial killer beasts are the outlier, and are willfully ignoring the fact that the book gives most of the people reading it the opposite impression (and thus, not doing anything to fix that impression in newer material). It's not purely a problem of presentation, though. Beast, like Vampire, has elements of both their condition and culture that make them inimical to the average person: the general need for a Hunger (in the absence of Family Dinner, for which see Geist analogy below) to harm others, cause suffering, or remove things of value, and the assertion in the few Beast Bylaws that their culture can agree upon that Beasts are entitled to feed that Hunger by whatever means, explicitly including murder. Vampire's just comfortable with a tone that understands the reader is going to take away that this means the characters are generally dysfunctional at best, and often much worse. The broken metaphor at Beast's core chafes at this, because Beasts don't act like what they stand for. (Contrast with Geist: Some fans respond to the criticism that it lacks for things to do or an impetus to adventure by pointing to how ghosts are floating around all the time staring directly at them and bugging them to get involved in their business. That's in the book, and it's not contradicted; it's just not given the attention or word count that kind of experience would demand if it were a formative one, deemphasized by omission.)
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Jan 26, 2017 20:44
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As nerdy as it is, I'm reminded of the Galactus from old Fantastic Four comics, who goes around eating planets, but nebulously turns out to be a sort of cosmic lynchpin keeping a greater (but far more generic) evil at bay with this existence. They could have at least done something similar with Beast, where beasts hold off some more terrifying threat (and maybe that's part of what their nightmare stuff turns to be about, scaring humans away from coming into contact with this threat). It would have been a fairly trite setup but at least you could have beasts running around being monsters while still having something to justify their existence. In that setup, heroes can simultaneously be morally justified and still have a "they know not what they do" quality. You already see this occasionally in White Wolf properties - sure, the Sabbat are bad, but the Antedeluvians and Infernalists are objectively worse. Granted, making your villains into anti-heroes by inventing a bigger jerk is pretty much just Genre Writing 101, but it's kind of amazing how a lot of the issues in Beast's conception could have been so easily avoided. I have no interest in "fixing" Beast with this line of thought (I think a splat of "all monsters not already defined by an existing splat monster" is a really bad core concept for an "of Darkness" game), but showing how trivial it is to conceive of something at least tolerable. Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Jan 26, 2017 |
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Jan 26, 2017 20:45
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It's noit even about giving them a justification to exist - it's that they need one. I mean, you look at vampires, and their self-justifications ring completely hollow. 'I drink blood because I need it to survive, and I am a monster because God demands it of us' for example. This is because the ultimate justification of every vampiric group is 'I do this because I can, and because I am strong and monstrous enough to take it.' And Vampire is pretty sure you realize that, that any justification is ultimately a hollow one meant to make the vampire feel better. You are meant to look at the justifications and realize how meaningless they are. Beast wants its justifications to actually be correct, and wants you to agree with it. And that is repugnant.
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Jan 26, 2017 20:50
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Also, Beast's antagonists are a problem for no one else but Beasts. Vampires may be parasites, but Strix are unfeeling catastrophe-magnets. Almost everything a Werewolf hunts can be Super bad for people. Even Mummies have Worse Mummies and Geists have lovely ghosts and bugmen that eat faces. In the absence of Beasts, you either don't have Heroes at all, or you just have...marginally shittier than normal people.
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Jan 26, 2017 21:05
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Mors Rattus posted:Beast wants its justifications to actually be correct, and wants you to agree with it. And that is repugnant.
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Jan 26, 2017 21:07
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If I were going to try to salvage the "capital H Heroes as antagonists" thing I'd look to, like, the myth of Hercules or the Robert Zemeckis Beowulf. That is, there are certain human beings who have an innate influence over others combined with a tendency to irresistable rage or compulsions or vulnerability to certain types of temptation, to the point where they are inherently doomed to lead civilization to ruin according to their tragic flaws if they don't die first. Beasts wouldn't feed on human suffering, because that's stupid and creepy in this context, and would rather be a mythological immune system designed to protect history from "Great Men."
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Jan 26, 2017 21:10
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Or as I realized a few moments after typing that, I would write Beast as the literal explanation of why the World of Darkness doesn't have Exalts. 
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Jan 26, 2017 21:11
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Again, though, everything about Beast works better either as it already exists in another game or adapted to slot into another game, not as a game line itself. If you flip the script so Beasts are immune responses to Heroes you end up with an entirely different game. It's a better game, I would check into it, but it's not Beast: the Primordial. It's really Hunter: the Vigil with a creepier set of powers and specific targets.
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Jan 26, 2017 21:20
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That's sort of what the Insatiables are supposed to be, but they're backfilled and stapled onto Beasts after the fact. And their threat is too vague and unknowable to even really be understood because you're not even sure if it's a thing that exists. The heroes in the book range from "Literally Dexter" or a pyromaniac psychopath, to a single mother who's wife was murdered by a Beast that then tried to kill her children, or a man who's gay lover was a Beast that was trying to groom him into being a better meal. Even then the Beasts that the Heroes are going after are pretty terrible things in their own right, as much as the book tries to demonize heroes it doesn't paint Beasts in a very positive light.
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Jan 26, 2017 21:21
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Tiny Deer posted:Again, though, everything about Beast works better either as it already exists in another game or adapted to slot into another game, not as a game line itself. I was going to say "it's Werewolf but more focused on the material world instead of Shadow" but yeah, that might be more accurate. I think a certain amount of redundancy is fine -- Changeling and Demon have extremely similar premises, for example, but they differentiate themselves in that Demon is drawing on spy and science fiction while Changeling is fairy tales and personal trauma. I don't know what that differentiating factor would be for my theoretical game line, though.
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Jan 26, 2017 21:26
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Alien Rope Burn posted:As nerdy as it is, I'm reminded of the Galactus from old Fantastic Four comics, who goes around eating planets, but nebulously turns out to be a sort of cosmic lynchpin keeping a greater (but far more generic) evil at bay with this existence. They could have at least done something similar with Beast, where beasts hold off some more terrifying threat (and maybe that's part of what their nightmare stuff turns to be about, scaring humans away from coming into contact with this threat). It would have been a fairly trite setup but at least you could have beasts running around being monsters while still having something to justify their existence. In that setup, heroes can simultaneously be morally justified and still have a "they know not what they do" quality. The old Baali clanbook revealed they did all their horrible stuff and pacts with demons in order to keep really powerful beings asleep and prevent the end of the world. By feeding them and draining power from them, they stayed asleep.
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Jan 26, 2017 21:56
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Mors Rattus posted:It's noit even about giving them a justification to exist - it's that they need one. I mean, you look at vampires, and their self-justifications ring completely hollow. 'I drink blood because I need it to survive, and I am a monster because God demands it of us' for example. This is because the ultimate justification of every vampiric group is 'I do this because I can, and because I am strong and monstrous enough to take it.' Beast tries to make its protagonists simultaneously predatory, innocent, and unapologetic. Unless you are an amazing writer that's a guaranteed recipe for a narratively dissonant mess.
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Jan 26, 2017 21:57
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:If I were going to try to salvage the "capital H Heroes as antagonists" thing I'd look to, like, the myth of Hercules or the Robert Zemeckis Beowulf. That is, there are certain human beings who have an innate influence over others combined with a tendency to irresistable rage or compulsions or vulnerability to certain types of temptation, to the point where they are inherently doomed to lead civilization to ruin according to their tragic flaws if they don't die first. Beasts wouldn't feed on human suffering, because that's stupid and creepy in this context, and would rather be a mythological immune system designed to protect history from "Great Men." Kill all Solars, after all. Fighting the embodied myth of the Great Man would be fun for horror, though. "Why the hell can't everyone else see he's crazy!? Why do they keep going along with him!?"
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Jan 26, 2017 22:00
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"I do bad things to keep even worse things from happening" is basically Greg Stolze's Better Angels in a nutshell with the added bonus that the "bad things" you're supposed to do are over-the-top supervillainous theatrics to placate the kind of dim-witted demon residing inside of you. "I mean sure, we could sacrifice twelve virgins on an obsidian altar...but you know what would be really cool is if we turned the Washington Monument into an interdimensional antenna to make contact with the DREAD FORCES OF THE GREAT BEYOND and use their unfathomable alien wisdom to manipulate the stock market."
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Jan 26, 2017 22:05
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Or as I realized a few moments after typing that, I would write Beast as the literal explanation of why the World of Darkness doesn't have Exalts. Lunars are already the Mythological Monster splat in Exalted.
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Jan 26, 2017 22:05
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I was going to say "it's Werewolf but more focused on the material world instead of Shadow" but yeah, that might be more accurate. Right? Beast lacks anything to make that meaningful distinction between it and other lines, except for its worst aspects. Demon and Changeling have radically different feels that are supported by mechanics, fluff, and given examples of play. You could run similar games in both, but usually you'd be better served picking one or the other. With Beast, picking other is just the default best option. I don't know what a uniquely Beast story would look like beyond that charming example of 'torture a bunch of people to death because they work for a vampire'. As a product I just don't think it differentiates itself enough, and beyond people not wanting to support it because it's so relentlessly offensive I think that's one reason the sales are dropping off.
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Jan 26, 2017 23:04
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Tiny Deer posted:Right? Beast lacks anything to make that meaningful distinction between it and other lines, except for its worst aspects. Demon and Changeling have radically different feels that are supported by mechanics, fluff, and given examples of play. You could run similar games in both, but usually you'd be better served picking one or the other. Do we have evidence that the sales are dropping off? I know that I'd like for the game to fade into obscurity but outside of wishful thinking is there anything?
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Jan 26, 2017 23:11
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Conquering Heroes is the first OPP book in recent memory to not hit gold within a day of being released, some have hit it in as little as an hour.
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Jan 26, 2017 23:25
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LordAbaddon posted:Do we have evidence that the sales are dropping off? I know that I'd like for the game to fade into obscurity but outside of wishful thinking is there anything? Only a very select club (I think about eight people; Rich, our DriveThru rep, White Wolf, maybe some others) get the sales figures. Everyone else, even Developers, are just guessing. If anyone told you they knew, for a fact, that Beast's sales were dropping off, they'd be lying. The best you can do are the metal awards at DriveThru, judging by which Beast has sold more copies than The Pack, Secrets of the Covenants, and Dark Eras. It's also sold more than 7th Sea and Godbound. Sourcebooks always have slower sales than corebooks, too. Werewolf did go Platinum, The Pack didn't.
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Jan 26, 2017 23:31
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You know something is going well in a mage game when not only has your fledgling group gotten itself mired between camps in Awakened politics, but they've also managed to get messed up between two vampires and are recruiting vampire hunters to act as a distraction. All from just destroying a single ghost. It's been really pretty great for introducing how their Orders operate and some of their goals, and the low-medium stakes currently mean that mistakes aren't going to be fatal. It's also been super useful for learning the spell casting system as they learn how to investigate pretty much everything using a combination of hacking, surveillance, time, forces, and mind. That said, even with Reaches and Conditions slowing things down, it's still easier to deal with 2E's magic system than 1E for new players. The step by step casting cheat sheets have been invaluable when combined with the Practice definitions at the table. Really looking forward to Signs of Sorcery coming out, but not looking forward to waiting for the print copy, as I imagine there will be time in between preview copy and final copy are available.
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Jan 26, 2017 23:38
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Also bear in mind that the RPGNow medal categories don't count kickstarter copies AFAIK unless they changed something, so the fact that Beast is a Platinum seller is relatively significant. Of course, it also means really successful kickstarters like 7th Sea have their medal numbers distorted further downward and comparing the two gets reallly unreliable.MonsieurChoc posted:The old Baali clanbook revealed they did all their horrible stuff and pacts with demons in order to keep really powerful beings asleep and prevent the end of the world. By feeding them and draining power from them, they stayed asleep. Yeah, the original Ventrue clanbook had "well, we need our giant mind control conspiracy to counter the bigger conspiracy" as well. It's something that gets revisited a lot (ed: the notion of a bigger bad, not the conspiracy in question, which was instantly forgotten).
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Jan 26, 2017 23:53
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Yeah, I should have speculated that a drop off in sales is pure speculation based on poor sales of Conquering Heroes. I have no secret insider knowledge.
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Jan 27, 2017 00:00
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I mean Beast is basically everything bad about the Old White Wolf in one game, of course there's a market for it.
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Jan 27, 2017 00:01
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Night10194 posted:I mean Beast is basically everything bad about the Old White Wolf in one game, of course there's a market for it. I wouldn't quite agree with that. Rather, Beast is in many ways an expression of what is hosed up with current day identity politics, including but not limited to its fixation with Gamergate, PUA/MRA/Fratboys, the Alt Right, Internet personalities, doxxing. It's everything bad about New White Wolf, and is really made visible by stuff like a disproportionate focus on cyber bullying in a supplement about violence and trauma.
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Jan 27, 2017 00:17
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LordAbaddon posted:Do we have evidence that the sales are dropping off? I know that I'd like for the game to fade into obscurity but outside of wishful thinking is there anything? Conquering Heroes took longer to hit Bronze Best-Seller status than any other Onyx Path or White Wolf release to date, at least.
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Jan 27, 2017 00:17
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Meanwhile, Exalted 3E remains firmly in the top 10 list after all this time, outselling any other OPP product besides maybe Mage 2E 
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Jan 27, 2017 00:22
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It's true, Mage is the best RPG.
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Jan 27, 2017 00:47
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Ferrinus posted:It's true, Mage is the best RPG. It is pretty much the only reason to even care about the rest of WoD.
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Jan 27, 2017 01:01
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